—“well,”—said my publisher. . . .
A delicate sunset was framed in a golden gap between gaunt mountains. The remote rims of the gap were eyelashed with firs and still further, deep in the gap itself, one could distinguish the silhouettes of other, lesser and quite ethereal, mountains. We were in Utah, sitting in the lounge of an Alpine hotel. The slender aspens on the near slopes and the pale pyramids of ancient mine dumps took advantage of the plateglass window to participate silently in our talk—somewhat in the same way as the Byronic pictures did in regard to the dialogue in Sobakevich’s house.
—“Well,”—said my publisher,—“I like it—but I do think the student ought to be told what it is all about.”
I said . . .
—“No,”—he said,—“I don’t mean that. I mean the student ought to be told more about Gogol’s books. I mean the plots. He would want to know what those books are about.”
I said . . .
—“No, you have not”—he said.—“I have gone through it carefully and so has my wife, and we have not found the plots. There should also be some kind of bibliography or chronology at the end. The student ought to be able to find his way, otherwise he would be puzzled and would not bother to read any further.”
I said that an intelligent person could always look up dates and things in a good encyclopedia or in any manual of Russian literature. He said that a student would not be necessarily an intelligent person and anyway would resent the trouble of having to look up things. I said there were students and students. He said that from a publisher’s point of view there was only one sort.
—“I have tried to explain,”—I said,—“that in Gogol’s books the real plots are behind the obvious ones. Those real plots I do give. His stories only mimic stories with plots. It is like a rare moth that departs from a moth-like appearance to mimic the superficial pattern of a structurally quite different thing—some popular butterfly, say.
—“That’s all right,”—he said.
—“Or rather unpopular, unpopular with lizards and birds.”
—“Yes, I understand,”—he said.—“I understand perfectly well. But after all a plot is a plot, and the student must be told what happens. For instance, until I read The Government Inspector myself I had not the slightest idea what it was all about although I had studied your manuscript.”
—“Tell me,”—I asked,—“what happens in The Inspector General?”
—“Well,”—he said, throwing himself back in his chair,—“what happens is that a young man gets stranded in a town because he had lost all his money at cards, and the town is full of politicians, and he uses the politicians to raise some money by making them believe that he is a Government official sent from headquarters to inspect them. And when he has used them, and made love to the Mayor’s daughter, and drunk the Mayor’s wine, and accepted bribes from judges and doctors and landowners and merchants and all kinds of administrators, he leaves the town, just before the real inspector arrives.”
I said—
—“Yes, of course you may use it,”—said my publisher cooperatively.—“Then there is also Dead Souls. I could not tell what it is all about after reading your chapter. And then, as I say, there ought to be a bibliography.”
—“If you mean a list of translations and books on Gogol . . .”
—“Well,”—said my publisher.
—“If you want that, the matter is simple, for except Guerney’s excellently rendered Dead Souls, The Inspector General and The Overcoat, which appeared while I was myself wrestling with them, there exists nothing but ridiculously garbled versions.”
At this point two cocker puppies, a draggle-eared black one with an appealing slant in the bluish whites of his eyes and a little white bitch with a pink-dappled face and belly, tumbled in through the door someone had opened, stumbled about on padded paws in between the furniture and were promptly caught and banished again to their place on the terrace.
—“Otherwise,”—I went on,—“I know of no English work on Gogol worth listing except Mirsky’s excellent chapter in his History of Russian Literature (Knopf, New York). Of course, there are hundreds of Russian works. Of these a few are very good, but lots of others belong to the preposterous schools of ‘Gogol the Painter of Tsarist Russia’ or ‘Gogol the Realist’ or ‘Gogol the Great Opposer of Serfdom and Bureaucracy’ or ‘Gogol the Russian Dickens.’ The trouble is that if I start listing these works, I am sure to try to allay my boredom by inserting here and there fictitious titles and imaginary authors so that you will never quite know whether Dobrolubov or Ivanov-Razumnik or Ovsyano Kuli—”
—“No,”—said my publisher hastily.—“I don’t think that a list of books on Gogol is necessary. What I meant, was a list of Gogol’s own books with a sequence of dates and a chronology of his doings, and something about the plots and so on. You could easily do this. And we must have Gogol’s picture.”
—“I have been thinking of that myself,”—I said. “Yes—let us have a picture of Gogol’s nose. Not his face and shoulders, etc. but only his nose. A big solitary sharp nose—neatly outlined in ink like the enlarged figure of some important part of a curious zoological specimen. I might ask Dobuzhinsky, that unique master of the line, or perhaps a Museum artist . . .”
—“And it would kill the book,”—said my publisher.
That is how the following pages got appended. This chronology is meant for the indolent reader who wants to take in Gogol’s life and labors at a glance instead of wallowing through my book in search of this or that relevant passage. Such passages are referred to in the chronology. The picture is the one described in the text and is reproduced from Veressaiev’s delightful biography of Gogol (1933, in Russian). Most of my facts are taken from the same convenient work—for instance Gogol’s long letter to his mother and such things. The deductions are my own. Desperate Russian critics, trying hard to find an Influence and to pigeonhole my own novels, have once or twice linked me up with Gogol, but when they looked again I had untied the knots and the box was empty.